Akiva plays.
He is wonderful at playing.
Sometimes toys roll under the shelves, & he has to look for them.
He makes one kind of toast—
and then another and another until he finds a proper sort of toast.
Then there is only waiting until it pops up.
After working in the kitchen, Akiva cleans up after himself.
He is quite meticulous in his cleaning.
Our house needs to be painted before we can sell it. It would be easier to paint if there weren’t so many kids around. So I took the kids and visited the Hack family in Connecticut. It was great!!! Actually, it was perfect. I mean, I don’t think anything went wrong. I’d tell you everything that went wrong, only I can’t think of anything other than the fact that I didn’t take any photos at all whatsoever of Iris & her best friend aside from this day when I took some photos of the kids all playing train tracks in the playroom. The playroom is really quite nice.
Joshua shows Akiva how the tracks go together.
Akiva mans the tunnel.
Joshua placed a stop sign at the end of it to make sure the trains do not go off the end of the track.
Iris looks for the perfect piece of track.
The end of the line.
How much track would it take to make a ramp all the way down the stairs?
Leigha makes a long train.
Roundabout the baby!
It snowed a lot.
Meanwhile, I stayed inside designing wearable mermaid tails for 13″ dolls.
Akiva’s favorite toy is the snow shovel.
It is cold again. We go to the farm.
It is very, very cold.
A baby goat peeks cautiously around the corner at the not-so-warming sunshine.
The goat makes Akiva nervous.
Iris pushes Akiva on the swing.
She is getting a bit large to fit in the baby swing herself.
This is how it is all winter: cold, hot. Cold, hot.
Every time it snows,
the sun comes around a couple days later with its big yellow face
and melts everything to puddles.
All winter long.
(Look! A stick!)
The first new baby goats were born at New Village Farm.
A little boy led us inside the manger.
Light beaming from the heavens illuminated the holy kids.
We have been waiting all winter for the confluence of cold and snow that we might hike down the LaPlatte River. Today, one day, they come together. My friend Ali and I pull sleds of children across wet, sticky snow. “How far should we go?” she asks. “Until we have to turn around,” I reply. After some time, wet overcomes snow and heat overcomes cold. My snowshoe breaks through the ice of the river. “It is time to turn around,” I say, gazing at the wet hot cold ice water snow river snaking on before me. I pull my leg out of the river. This is as far as we make it this year. The river has not been frozen enough to travel to the bay since the year Iris was two.
We had an ICE STORM.
Ice covered EVERYTHING—
every single blade of grass that poked its tip out of the crusted snow.
Boughs bent slowly down.
Icicles followed, curving toward the ground.
Iris felt the weight of ice that pained the plants.
Futilely, she tried to relieve them of their burden.
She was sad she could not help them.
I tried to distract her with beauty.
But all she could think about was pain.
When someone finally stops talking about something,
how do we know whether or not they are still thinking about it?
Umbels!
And grids.
This is our woods.
The most beautiful place.
These are my children.
I took them out into the ice storm as great branches cracked and tumbled to the ground.
